Are you ready for Black Friday?

Only a few years ago, Black Friday was an alien concept to British retailers. The day after Thanksgiving, a holiday we don’t celebrate in the UK, Black Friday marks the traditional beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US. Known for its massive discounts, the day has made the journey across the pond to bring a whole new period of sales into UK retailers.

Who can forget the news stories of the carnage in Asda supermarkets last year as shoppers fought tooth and nail over cut-price electronics? As a result, Asda are bowing out of the frenzy this year, but the phenomenon shows no signs as stopping as other retailers announce their discounting plans across the Black Friday weekend and online for Cyber Monday.

So how can smaller retailers compete, and drive the extra into their stores and onto their websites on one of the busiest shopping days of the year?

SMS campaigns can cut through the endless noise of competitor promotions, informing your customers of your deals direct to their phones. Offering exclusive one-off deals, whether they be buy-one-get-one-frees (BOGOFs), 20% off or free gifts with each purchase, can spur people on to make extra purchases then and there, shifting excess stock and filling any gaps in your cash flow.

Unique offer codes can help you track exactly how many people acted on your messages, so you can measure the direct impact that your text message sends have had on your sales (if you don’t have any unique codes, we can generate those for you). We’ve had retailers make over 3300% return on investment using SMS, so combining this with one of the busiest shopping days in the year makes perfect sense.

Text message attachments are a great way to get promotional material to your customers; if you have a PDF, Word or Power Point version of leaflets and flyers for your Black Friday deals, attach them to a text message via a simple link – we’ll host them online for you.

Start the Christmas shopping season with a bang this year, and get your SMS sends ready for Black Friday on November 27th, and Cyber Monday on the 30th. If you want some advice on getting started, or how to include promotions into your existing text message sends, check out our free guides or call our customer service team on 01244 752299.